SEPTEMBER feels as much, if not more, a turn of the year than January. It’s not simply that for many it is the start of a new term, the start of a new school or university year. It is also something in the air — something, perhaps, in the collective memory about harvest and the completion of a cycle of sowing and reaping, about the ripening of fruit, the apples ready to pluck before they fall, and the fallen fruit already enriching and seeding the soil for next year.
Of course, the whole seasonal turn is more dramatic for rural and farming communities. However many intervening generations of town-dwellers lie between, we are all, ultimately, descended from farmers and farm labourers. Perhaps that’s why John Clare, the “peasant poet”, had so many urban readers. Close observations of what was, for him, everyday life became, for others, the evocation of a lost world, as in his description, in the September section of his The Shepherd’s Calendar, of the harvest being brought in from the fields at last:
Anon the fields are wearing clear
And glad sounds hum in labours ear
When children halo ‘here they come’
And run to meet the harvest home
Stuck thick with boughs and thronged with boys
Who mingle loud a merry noise.
“Stuck thick with boughs and thronged with boys” is both a vivid image and a truly memorable line. We have some sense of harvest home in the fields and farms around North Walsham, though health and safety would scarcely allow the combine harvesters to be “thronged with boys”.
On the other hand, Clare’s glimpse of the Septembral orchard, with its glowing fruit and the bees buzzing in and out of hollyhocks from the crevices of an old stone wall, could be a scene from any number of gardens including our own:
Where blushing apples round and red
Load down the boughs. . .
Where the holly oak so tall
Far o’er tops the garden wall
That latest blooms for bees provide
Hived on stone benches close beside
The bees their teazing music hum. . .
The bees were probably more numerous, and “their teazing music” nearer to ubiquitous, in Clare’s day, though. Indeed, reading The Shepherd’s Calendar, with its close observation of the sheer throng and bustle of life in the countryside, alive with the songs of birds and the hum of insects, one senses how much we have lost. Clare himself lamented and protested against the ripping up of hedgerows and the enclosure of what was once common land, to the enrichment of some and the impoverishment of so many:
Inclosure came and trampled on the grave
Of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave.
Were Clare to revisit some of his rural scenes now, his poetry might be less a celebration of sheer variety and abundance, and more an elegy for all that has been lost.